Product support and service typically involves sending a customer engineer to a customer site to service a product. Once on-site, the customer engineer will attempt to ascertain or diagnose the problem which led to the visit and implement a repair. Remote support and service may be accomplished over the telephone through a series of questions and answers between the customer and the customer engineer. Unfortunately, the problem described by the customer is not always the actual problem, and quite often, the customer can not give answers to questions from the customer engineer. The foregoing results in an unhappy customer and a frustrated customer engineer.
There exists a need for a remote diagnostics tool which reduces the cost of providing service and support to customers. Since a portion of all service calls do not require the replacement of hardware, it would be desirable to provide for service calls without an on-site visit by a customer engineer. For example, there would be savings of both time and money if service requests could be handled from a centralized location by a remote diagnostics tool over standard telephone lines.
It would be desirable and of considerable advantage to provide a diagnostic tool having an easy to use graphical interface which provides for continuous remote monitoring and modification of selected instrument variables. Furthermore, it would be advantageous if such an interface could also provide automated access to signals generated by the instrument to update the graphical interface with the current configuration of the instrument and the identity of current instrument variables and their output values.